Re: suggestions about displaying time and title in week view

I think that solves for the use case of someone trying to keep on top  
of what they need to do next (although arguable, the Preview pane  
does this better).

However, it doesn't address situations where the user needs a high- 
level overview of their day/week.

e.g.

It's 9:30AM in the morning, someone stops by the office and asks if  
I'm going to be in the office for the conference call to New Zealand  
tonight. It's nice to glance at my calendar and know that tonight, I  
have salsa class or dinner with a friend or need to pick-up somebody  
at the airport. Or to see a reminder that the last express train out  
of work is at 6:37PM. I don't want to have to remember to scroll down  
to check.

I'm scanning my calendar to find a good day to take a few hours out  
of the morning to go to the dentist. Having a single view of  
everything I'm going to be doing from morning to night is a must for  
figuring out which days are more open and which days are too activity- 
packed. ie. I might be looking for a morning slot and so I have the  
calendar canvas centered around the 1st half of the day. I find a  
relatively free morning on my calendar, but if I have flight leaving  
at 8:53PM that same night, it means I will need to leave work, go  
home, go to the airport etc...which in turn also means that it's not  
a great day to check-out for a few hours in the morning.

Which is the long way of saying: we need to give users enough room to  
back away from the t.v. screen so they can see the whole picture.  
Otherwise, you're watching the tennis match by turning your head left  
to right and you have to piece the picture together in your head.  
(Perhaps this is a poor analogy.)

In the end, I think the ability to scan your calendar at a glance  
outweighs the need to view half-hour events with 2 lines of text.

Mimi :o/

On May 1, 2006, at 5:11 PM, Jeremy Epstein wrote:

> Can the time window always center on "now"?  (i.e. it moves slowly  
> as the day passes to night)
>
> Mimi Yin wrote:
>> This might be difficult for users with smaller screens. Assuming  
>> you have 1 or 2 rows of items in the all-day area, that would  
>> leave you with a calendar canvas that can only display 7.5 hours  
>> at a time. Which by today's standards, is a pretty short work-day  
>> (at least in the U.S.) ;o) (See screenshot below).
>>
>> If people are using the calendar for work + home, it makes it hard  
>> to see the whole day in a single glance. (Morning gym work-out,  
>> Meetings, After-work dinner plans).
>>
>> With a shared office calendar (which is one of our core use cases  
>> for small group collaborative calendaring), users will have lots  
>> more all-day items (PTO, holidays, cleaning days, etc) and the  
>> calendar canvas could easily shrink to 6 hours.
>>
>> I think 1 hour meetings are still by-in-large more common than  
>> half-hour meetings? It might be better to design around 1-hour as  
>> the default, rather than half-hour.
>>
>> Users with larger screens, or lots of half-hour meetings can  
>> always change the hour settings.
>>
>> Mimi
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>> ---
>>
>>
>> On Apr 30, 2006, at 5:21 PM, Mitch Kapor wrote:
>>
>>> A 30 minute meeting should normally be tall enough to display two  
>>> lines of text, not one, in order to show a time and a title.   
>>> This can be helped  by reducing the default # of hours to be  
>>> shown on screen.
>>>
>>> Use the time zone icon approach Mimi prototyped to save space.
>>>
>>> Always display columns wide enough to show time  as HH:MM XM or  
>>> HH:MM XM TZ if the event is in a different time zone than the  
>>> currently viewed one.  Never truncate._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _  
>>> _ _ _ _
>>>
>>> Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list
>>> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>> ---
>>
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>>
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>

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